Thank God It's Monday?
Aren't weekends supposed to be relaxing? This has not been. At all.
It's not like anything hugely bad happened, just many smaller moderately bad or upsetting things that have combined to create a very bad feeling in my stomach.
On the work front, I basically elected myself the spokesperson for the crew of the machine I work on, which will entail filling out some paperwork and having a meeting with our area manager to see how we can make the machine more efficient. I pushed myself forward mostly because the one thing that just doesn't work (as I have seen) is someone coming in for a bitch and moan session. Which is what most of the older workers on the line will do. Most of them are cynical (with justification) and they aren't interested in playing games with management. But management won't listen to a bunch of blue collar workers bitching. They want to see concrete suggestions along with the problems, presented in a calm, reasonable manner.
I have a few legs up on my co-workers - I'm a college graduate, I'm patient with a high tolerance for bullshit, and I speak corporatese. Also, I write for a hobby, so I'm better at presenting my arguments than they are, to be brutally frank.
My worry isn't the meeting itself, it's the fact that one of our problems with efficiency is our supervisor. The same supervisor that wanted me to be the spokesperson and does, in fact, like me. He's a decent fellow, but not a very good supervisor. Two items on our list of problems are related to him directly. And he's going to be at this meeting. This does not make me feel very good, but I promised I'd raise these concerns ('cause hell, it IS a problem).
On the gaming front, I had two bad gaming (Dungeons and Dragons) sessions out of three this weekend. The first bad one was the game I run as a Dungeon Master (DM). That game contains my husband, another married couple, a mutual female friend, and my father (who taught me how to play). My father and this female friend got into a very serious argument in-character, to the point where the two characters don't want to work together anymore. The whole premise of D&D is a band of heroes working together to do something. It was not quite an argument in between my father and this friend, but it does represent a potential split in the party. And frankly, I just can't deal with that.
We've been playing this particular campaign going on two years now, and unless these two can reconcile their character differences or give me a damn good reason to bring in another character, I'm going to end this campaign and start another. I've invested a crapload of story into these particular characters, and having new ones show up willy-nilly just ruins the story. It would be like in the Lord of the Rings if some new character had showed up to take Aragorn's role in the third act. I think of myself as a good DM, but if these players can't figure something out on their own as mature adults, I'm not going to make them try to play with characters that act as oil and water to each other.
The second bad session was one run by another player, the married fellow from my game. He's just starting running a different gaming group (which also includes me) through a D&D version of Final Fantasy IV, which I've never played. We opened the game with us delivering a package to a remote village in order to get into the king's good graces. After fighting our way past a dragon, we got to this village. Then the package flew out of our hands and ignited every person and building in the village with flames that could not be put out, leaving only a single girl alive, who we ended up taking with us. Yeah, we kicked off our campaign with genocide.
Maybe this isn't so bad if you're playing a video game, but in a role-playing game it's a lot more immediate and personal. It left me very disturbed, and another player so out-of-sorts that he immediately made a new character, because he couldn't conceive that his character would continue to travel with the distraught little orphan we took with us.
Understandable. I considered the same thing. Did I mention I was playing a cleric of the god of the sea? Yeah, serious crisis of faith for my character. I don't mind intense role-playing, but that was too much. After the DM had left, we discussed that we found it too much. Also, we want to have another player run instead of our DM, as one fellow in the group has FF4 memorized, and keeps bringing up game plot points his character couldn't possibly know. Not to mention our current DM has a bad habit of not preparing very well. AND he's already running another D&D game based on FF1. I'd rather this DM concentrate all his rather divided attention on the one game he's running, and not try to burn himself out (and creep us out) by running another FF game.
Finally, on the home front, Mr. Chat and I are going to put a build-in set of shelves in one corner of our kitchen. We've brought my very handy father in to aid us in the construction. The thing is... I know I'm going to end up doing most of the labor. My dad can't do any of the work himself, as he's badly crippled by arthritis. Mr. Chat won't be able to do much of it, as he has back problems, and it's going to require a lot of bending over and working in a cramped space, either sanding, painting, or using power tools in an awkward position. He might try, but he'll end up in pain, and I'll have to step in.
I don't mind that we're doing it, exactly. We certainly need the space, as we recently acquired several desired but bulky appliances at an estate sale. I am a little exasperated at my husband because of his optimism, which sounds horrible, I know. But he had the odd idea that we were going to be able to do this in a concentrated afternoon's effort. Um... no. It's going to take at least a week. We got some of the tools from my father's house to ours, only to discover, of course, we needed about another six. The stud finder didn't work because we have plaster-and-lathe walls, so it reads everything as a stud. We got the lumber, but couldn't paint it, because we didn't have sawhorses, nor had we sanded it. And then we found out we'll need yet more lumber. I will have to do painting and sanding in the garage during the one hour of free time I have after coming home from work during the next two days, because otherwise I'll have to use my days off to do it. And, by God, I am going to get some writing done during those days off, because my weekend was shot to shit with bad gaming sessions and aborted attempts at carpentry.
Pretty much I've been walking around with a hole in my stomach for the whole day, worrying about all that crap, plus the usual. My house is a disaster zone, I haven't been to the gym in months, my bookshelves looks like a malicious whirlwind just tossed the books on it randomly, and I'm about to strangle my husband because the one household chore he actually does takes ten fucking times longer than me doing the same thing.
Grr.
It's not like anything hugely bad happened, just many smaller moderately bad or upsetting things that have combined to create a very bad feeling in my stomach.
On the work front, I basically elected myself the spokesperson for the crew of the machine I work on, which will entail filling out some paperwork and having a meeting with our area manager to see how we can make the machine more efficient. I pushed myself forward mostly because the one thing that just doesn't work (as I have seen) is someone coming in for a bitch and moan session. Which is what most of the older workers on the line will do. Most of them are cynical (with justification) and they aren't interested in playing games with management. But management won't listen to a bunch of blue collar workers bitching. They want to see concrete suggestions along with the problems, presented in a calm, reasonable manner.
I have a few legs up on my co-workers - I'm a college graduate, I'm patient with a high tolerance for bullshit, and I speak corporatese. Also, I write for a hobby, so I'm better at presenting my arguments than they are, to be brutally frank.
My worry isn't the meeting itself, it's the fact that one of our problems with efficiency is our supervisor. The same supervisor that wanted me to be the spokesperson and does, in fact, like me. He's a decent fellow, but not a very good supervisor. Two items on our list of problems are related to him directly. And he's going to be at this meeting. This does not make me feel very good, but I promised I'd raise these concerns ('cause hell, it IS a problem).
On the gaming front, I had two bad gaming (Dungeons and Dragons) sessions out of three this weekend. The first bad one was the game I run as a Dungeon Master (DM). That game contains my husband, another married couple, a mutual female friend, and my father (who taught me how to play). My father and this female friend got into a very serious argument in-character, to the point where the two characters don't want to work together anymore. The whole premise of D&D is a band of heroes working together to do something. It was not quite an argument in between my father and this friend, but it does represent a potential split in the party. And frankly, I just can't deal with that.
We've been playing this particular campaign going on two years now, and unless these two can reconcile their character differences or give me a damn good reason to bring in another character, I'm going to end this campaign and start another. I've invested a crapload of story into these particular characters, and having new ones show up willy-nilly just ruins the story. It would be like in the Lord of the Rings if some new character had showed up to take Aragorn's role in the third act. I think of myself as a good DM, but if these players can't figure something out on their own as mature adults, I'm not going to make them try to play with characters that act as oil and water to each other.
The second bad session was one run by another player, the married fellow from my game. He's just starting running a different gaming group (which also includes me) through a D&D version of Final Fantasy IV, which I've never played. We opened the game with us delivering a package to a remote village in order to get into the king's good graces. After fighting our way past a dragon, we got to this village. Then the package flew out of our hands and ignited every person and building in the village with flames that could not be put out, leaving only a single girl alive, who we ended up taking with us. Yeah, we kicked off our campaign with genocide.
Maybe this isn't so bad if you're playing a video game, but in a role-playing game it's a lot more immediate and personal. It left me very disturbed, and another player so out-of-sorts that he immediately made a new character, because he couldn't conceive that his character would continue to travel with the distraught little orphan we took with us.
Understandable. I considered the same thing. Did I mention I was playing a cleric of the god of the sea? Yeah, serious crisis of faith for my character. I don't mind intense role-playing, but that was too much. After the DM had left, we discussed that we found it too much. Also, we want to have another player run instead of our DM, as one fellow in the group has FF4 memorized, and keeps bringing up game plot points his character couldn't possibly know. Not to mention our current DM has a bad habit of not preparing very well. AND he's already running another D&D game based on FF1. I'd rather this DM concentrate all his rather divided attention on the one game he's running, and not try to burn himself out (and creep us out) by running another FF game.
Finally, on the home front, Mr. Chat and I are going to put a build-in set of shelves in one corner of our kitchen. We've brought my very handy father in to aid us in the construction. The thing is... I know I'm going to end up doing most of the labor. My dad can't do any of the work himself, as he's badly crippled by arthritis. Mr. Chat won't be able to do much of it, as he has back problems, and it's going to require a lot of bending over and working in a cramped space, either sanding, painting, or using power tools in an awkward position. He might try, but he'll end up in pain, and I'll have to step in.
I don't mind that we're doing it, exactly. We certainly need the space, as we recently acquired several desired but bulky appliances at an estate sale. I am a little exasperated at my husband because of his optimism, which sounds horrible, I know. But he had the odd idea that we were going to be able to do this in a concentrated afternoon's effort. Um... no. It's going to take at least a week. We got some of the tools from my father's house to ours, only to discover, of course, we needed about another six. The stud finder didn't work because we have plaster-and-lathe walls, so it reads everything as a stud. We got the lumber, but couldn't paint it, because we didn't have sawhorses, nor had we sanded it. And then we found out we'll need yet more lumber. I will have to do painting and sanding in the garage during the one hour of free time I have after coming home from work during the next two days, because otherwise I'll have to use my days off to do it. And, by God, I am going to get some writing done during those days off, because my weekend was shot to shit with bad gaming sessions and aborted attempts at carpentry.
Pretty much I've been walking around with a hole in my stomach for the whole day, worrying about all that crap, plus the usual. My house is a disaster zone, I haven't been to the gym in months, my bookshelves looks like a malicious whirlwind just tossed the books on it randomly, and I'm about to strangle my husband because the one household chore he actually does takes ten fucking times longer than me doing the same thing.
Grr.